Mexicans mourn earthquake dead
JUCHITAN, Mexico—Slowmoving funeral processions converged on Juchitan’s cemeteries from all directions on Saturday, so many that they sometimes caused temporary gridlock when they met at intersections.
A monster earthquake and a Gulf coast hurricane have combined to take at least 67 lives in Mexico, and no place suffered more than the Oaxaca state city of Juchitan, where 37 died as buildings collapsed in the magnitude 8.1 temblor.
The graveyard swelled with mourners and blaring serenades for the dead—the sounds of snare drums, saxophones and sobbing. Pallbearers carried the caskets around rubble the quake had knocked from the simple concrete crypts. Jittery amid continued aftershocks, friends and relatives of the deceased had hushed conversations in the Zapotec language as they stood under umbrellas for shade from the beating sun.
Paulo Cesar Escamilla Matus and his family held a memorial service for his mother, Reynalda Matus Martinez, in the living room of her home, where relatives quietly wept beside her body.
The 64-year-old woman was working the night shift at a neighborhood pharmacy when the quake struck Thursday night, collapsing the building.
“All the weight of the second floor fell on top of her,” said her son, who rushed to the building and found her under rubble. He and neighbors tried to dig her out, but weren’t able to recover her body until the next morning when civil defense workers brought a backhoe that could lift what had trapped her.
Scenes of mourning were repeated over and over again in Juchitan, where a third of the city’s homes collapsed or were uninhabitable, President Enrique Pena Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network. Part of the city hall collapsed.
The remains of brick walls and clay tile roofs cluttered streets as families dragged mattresses onto sidewalks to spend a second anxious night sleeping outdoors. Some were newly homeless, while others feared further aftershocks could topple their cracked adobe dwellings.
Rescuers searched for survivors with sniffer dogs and used heavy machinery at the main square to pull rubble away from city hall, where a missing police officer was believed to be inside.
The man’s body was found Saturday afternoon in a collapsed passageway between city hall offices and a market, according to a municipal police officer who was guarding the site. The officer declined to give his name because he was not officially authorized to give information to reporters.
The city’s civil defense coordinator, Jose Antonio Marin Lopez, said similar searches had been going on all over the area.
“The priority continues to be the people,” Marin said.